"I mean more than that. My inside self said, 'Yes, yes, that's what I always meant. That's what I meant and what I wanted before ever I met you.' Then meeting you obscured everything else, but when you spoke I saw that what I had always wanted rhymed with what you had always wanted. But I want to be quite sure. May I ask questions?" "Yes." "Suppose we had been really married--would you have been contented to spend your working life on a farm, to live just that life that you spoke of that day going to Warwick?" She did not speak for a moment, and for a moment he wished that he had not questioned. And when she did speak it was not to give him an answer. "I didn't believe it was possible," she said. "I thought people couldn't make farming succeed, nowadays, and I don't think I could bear to spend my working life, as you call it, on a thing that is foredoomed to failure." "Nor could I; and I don't mean to, either. My farm will succeed. If it costs me every penny I have it shall succeed. I shall go a new way to work. You know I've really got quite a lot of money, and I have a plan." "Tell me about it." "It's quite simple, and absolutely opposed to all the accursed teachings of political economy. Of course I shall get the best machinery and the best seeds and the best implements. But I shall also get the best labor." "Doesn't every one try to do that?" "Oh yes, every farmer tries to get the best labor he can, at current rates. I sha'n't bother about the current rates. I shall get the best men that are to be got and I shall pay them wages that will make them glad to come to me rather than to any one else. If I find a man's good I shall give him a share in the profits of the farm; if I find he isn't any good I shall sack him." "I wonder," she said, "whether you'd have the heart to sack any one?" "I might hesitate to sack a mere fool," he admitted. "I might be tempted to keep him on and find some work for him that even a fool could do. But I'd chuck a slacker at a week's notice and never turn a hair. You'll see; I shall have failures, many of them, but the whole thing won't be a failure. Before I've done I shall have the best carters, the best dairy-women, the best bailiff, and the best plowman and the most successful farm in the country. You don't know how men can work who are working for themselves and not just for a master." "You mean to make it a sort of communal farm?" "Never," he said. "That's the last thing I mean it to be. But it will be a profit-sharing farm, and I shall run it. It's my own idea, the darling of my soul, and I won't trust its life to any other man. I'm almost afraid to trust it to you, for fear you should not be kind to it. But if what you said on the way to Warwick meant something that lasts in you--not just the beautiful thoughts of the moment--tell me, if we were really married could you endure a life like that?" "I should know nothing about it; I should be of no use. And we're not married--"